She is the most prepared person in the room. She is one of the last to be heard.

Simple. But Not Easy. is a leadership book that begins where most leadership books end.

She is still practicing her face in the parking garage at 7: 51 am. Not too big— too big reads desperate. Not too small—too small reads angry. She's been told she has too much executive presence, and not enough. In the same career. By people who could never explain what either phrase meant.

Her name is Ida. This is her story—a Black woman learning to see herself clearly through a pair of invisible glasses she never chose to wear, prescribed for a lifetime of code-switching, shrinking, and assimilating to survive inside a white male corporate world.

But Ida is in more rooms than you think. If you have ever shrunk your voice to fit a meeting, softened your ideas so they'd be more palatable for others, or watched your work come back to you in someone else's mouth—you already know part of this story too.

Drawing on more than thirty years training leaders inside Fortune 100 companies, and her work as a certified hypnotherapist and mindset coach, Alaina McMurtry braids Ida's specific, unflinching story with a clear map of how the mind protects us—and how to finally take the glasses off.

It is written through the lens of a Black woman navigating corporate America—and honest enough to hold space for anyone who has ever been made to feel smaller than their power.

The work is simple. It has never been easy.